I like numbers.
My favourite subject in school was math. I had a math-focused school and an extra math-focused math class.
I’m not good at Higher and Further Mathematics (Advanced Level Mathematics), studying it came at my university years, and my professor was the worst, unfortunately. School math, I’m very good at it, and I was very fortunate to have a very talented teacher too.
But, this story is about real life than math, actually. I rather mention this only because for some weird reason I’m very attracted to numbers. Everywhere. I have no idea what was the fountainhead of my math journey, me liking it or my school.
There are opinions that math gives some understanding of the real world. Maybe it’s true, I’m not as good as Pythagoras, Euclid, or Archimedes to explore the matter properly. But I want to stress the opposite opinion. Sometimes it actually does not give any understanding of the real world.
What I have on my mind is the difference of numbers.
- For me, two hours without food feels okay. But three hours feels much worse, and at four hours I’m starving. But if that’s the evening, I can skip dinner and not be hungry till the morning, especially if I managed to get asleep early (8 or 9 pm). Numbers are just different through the day. I know that, because I actually track many things of my life with numbers.
- As a work with computers, they usually have fans that make them cooler. Fans have RPM (rotation per minute) parameter. Usually it’s from, say, 1,800 as the minimum to 6,800 as the maximum. Doesn’t tell you anything? Ditto. But there’s one interesting detail, you may take two very close numbers, say, 3,800 and 4,800 and while they look similar, they may bear very huge difference in loudness. One may be ‘I can barely hear the fan, does it work?’ While another may be ‘oh my, the laptop is so loud! Are we flying somewhere?’
- Same with